Browsing Tag: aids

Hepatitis B is spread in the
same ways as HIV, only more so. It’s actually more infectious
than HIV and so blood contact, sexual contact, mother to child
transmission is only a magnified problem for Hepatitis
B in comparison to HIV. The best thing that we have for Hepatitis B prevention
is a vaccine and we have– at CDC, have committed
ourselves to a national goal of eliminating transmission of Hepatitis B in
the United States. About 15,000 persons die
of Hepatitis C every year. That’s about a 50% increase
in just an eight year period. Right now the number
of people dying of hepatitis C associated
deaths has surpassed the number of people dying of
HIV/AIDS, a testament both to how the nation has
successfully responded to the AIDS epidemic and
what is needed to be done to have a similar response
to this Hepatitis C epidemic.

I am Ryan, a friend of Lizzie’s. I do bio-physics research
at Georgetown University, and I also coordinate two non-profits
that deal mostly with supporting families and supporting people in their relationships. Here is my family. So my mission in life basically
is to help people get along, and towards that end,
I do a lot of workshops with families and I also help families
understand medical questions. So I am here to talk with you about circumcision, I am calling it an “Elephant in the Hospital” because it is this huge thing that happens
as far as I see in our culture but we have very little discourse about it. It is performed between 500,000 and 1,000,000
million times each year in the U.S., almost entirely on infants within
the first three days of life and it is completely unnecessary;
and I believe, based on my research, entirely harmful to children. So what we are going to run through,
as quickly as I can, is just a discussion what that process is like
from the child’s point of view, what effects it has on adult survivors, how we get parents to agree to it
(what understanding parents have), and how we get practitioners to perform it. So before we do that, I actually just want
to get a chance to see what our room is like so we can see each other; therefore, I will ask a few questions
and we’re gonna use this technology for room assessment that goes back to a before clickers.
I am going to ask you, if you are willing, to point in the direction as I ask you about each thing, from beneficial, this wall is the beneficial wall, neutral is the ceiling,
and harmful is the wall over there. For Example, what do you think of foot binding? I mean you are anthropologists,
most of you have heard of foot binding. Where do you think it goes on the … okay we have everyone who chose to respond,
thinks it is harmful. Good I am pleased with that response. Female Genital Cutting how many people have heard of that? Okay great, we have got universally harmful. Okay what about say we were going
to do prophylactic breast bud removal, say we wanted to stop breast cancer and save hundreds of thousands of women’s lives per year, and say we just cut all babies’ breast buds off? Beneficial? Harmful? Neutral? Okay some neutral and some harmful. Okay. And what about cutting off non-essential tissue from a child, say we just cut off all children’s ear lobes because we thought they were an inconvenience,
a pain or they looked ugly? Okay, we have got harmful. So what about Circumcision? What is our starting point? We have got every response, that’s great; okay, so we have a diverse audience. Now a couple of other questions just to see who we are. Who here thinks that they have a foreskin, anyone? Who here believes that they have a foreskin, which is that part they remove during circumcision, right? Okay, so that is a trick question. Men and women, males and females, are both born with foreskins, the foreskin is just a name for a part of the clitoris or penis, and so probably most of the women here have one and perhaps some of the males also. Who here comes from a culture where female genital cutting is a social norm? No one, okay. Who here comes from a culture where male genital cutting is a social norm? Okay, all of us pretty much, that I can see, okay. And who knows someone who was genitally altered as a child it could be you, it could be a friend it could be your parents, or child? Mostly (all)! Great, so all of that is just to illustrate how it’s something that has
touched all of our lives in some way. So I am arguing that it is this big thing and that we don’t talk about it a lot. So I have to sort of explain why I think that. So I believe that the discourse that we have in our culture about circumcision is one that is used to conceal what the nature of the process is. So you may have heard things like “well, you know,
it makes the penis cleaner” and things like that. You may have heard things like “everyone does it,” “I am circumcised, I am fine,” “It is just a little snip” or “it removes a useless flap of skin,” this sort of trivializing language. Well, we have heard all of these things. What I am going to ask you to do is set all that aside, all of that mass of experience in your mind, and to try to come at it from a fresh angle where these sort of illogical arguments of support for it are not part of your way of thinking. I am going to propose that circumcision is this cyclical process in our culture where we do it to children, they grow up to become adult survivors, some of those people become parents, and practitioners engage them in order to perform this surgery on their children, which unlike any other surgery I am aware of in U.S. hospitals, it removes a healthy and unique organ part (actually with the exception of inter-sex genital modification, which bears a lot of resemblance to it by the way). It removes a healthy part of the body. It is not used as a treatment. Doctors don’t think they are treating the children; they know it is a social surgery they are performing. It has significant complications. It is performed on minors who cannot give their consent. It is illegal, it is actually a federal felony to perform on girls, but it is actually encouraged and performed on boys. It results in life long function loss, and the tissue is then used commercially. So just a little context piece. I hear you, believe me, and I will show you evidence of that. I won’t make such a radical claim without proving it. So let’s just finish our context piece
with both the geography and the history. So this is a map of the world sort of. As you can see green countries represent places where
genital cutting of boys is not practiced, generally speaking. The small, the few yellow countries up in the northern regions are places where it is becoming legally questioned. Circumcision is now rare in Canada, England, and Australia where it used to be practiced on babies also, but stopped. In fact, in England, in the 1950’s there was an article published showing it killed a number of children a year, about 14 a year, so they stopped the practice there. And the other places, besides the United States where it is done on babies, in the other regions, most of the time, it is done on adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa and in Sunni Islamic cultures. Now how did we get here? It has become a medical practice rather than a
tribal practice or a cultural practice. And that came about in the late 1800’s when people had not the germ theory of disease, but the nervous excitation theory of disease. And people had the Victorian morality, so people see what they expect to see a lot of the time. So you can find a lot of published medical literature
showing that circumcision cured things such as, paralysis, epilepsy, hip joint disease, and all sorts of problems that today seem very unlikely for the process to have cured. And people really thought that actually harming,
the intention was to harm the genitals of the children. And they thought that it would help in the long term because it would prevent them from
having so much sexual excitation that being, in the Victorian model, the most dangerous
type of excitation that one could have. So, uhm, oops, I should have given you a caveat, my apologies… There are going to be some graphic slides here, and I certainly welcome you turn away at any point
if you don’t feel comfortable about looking at what you see. And I will try to more often try to give you a warning
when they are about to come up. I would also mention actually another caveat: I am going to use language differently. I am going to switch now to mostly
calling circumcision “genital cutting” because I think that is more of a neutral term, it’s a more accurate or descriptive term. I think “circumcision” euphemistically embeds
our assumption that it is a fine thing. And the term uncircumcised
I am going to replace with the term “intact”, because likewise the term “uncircumcised”
gives the sense that circumcision is the norm and that those who are not circumcised are
simply “not yet” circumcised. And to illustrate that it would be kind of weird
if we called women who had breasts”un-mastectomised” right that would be uncomfortable, and, likewise, I hope to sensitize us to the discomfort
of calling “intact” “uncircumcised”. So the next few slides will have some
less-comfortable things to see, and, again, you are welcome to turn away if you want. So this is the section on the Child. The procedure for the child, we will
run through what the procedure looks like. That’s probably the most graphic section,
along with the complications, and what I want you to think about is, it is often times talked about from the parents’
perspective,”parents have the right to choose”. I want you to question that discourse and think
about what the child’s point of view is. Who owns the child’s body? What rights do they have? Why are we doing it to boys and not girls? What does that say about our views on gender, and so on? So, this slide shows three different representations
of people in the genital cutting process. The top left is a young girl being circumcised in her cultural scenario. The top right is a young boy being
circumcised in his cultural scenario. And the bottom right is an
infant boy in a hospital. Now what I want you to look at is their faces. Just look at their faces because I am asking you to think about their experiences. To me it looks like they are having a very similar experience. And yet in our culture, where I think of us as being kind of imperialist we’re very ready to point the finger and say, Oh these terrible things these people do in these other
countries where they practice female genital cutting.” yet we’re silent about the male genital cutting that occurs to children under the same conditions of hygiene and the same death rates in those countries; and we promote doing it to boys in our country. So how do we do a circumcision? The next bits are going to be the most graphic. This is a circumcision restraint; they strap the baby down into it, and then they proceed with the procedure, which I am going to show you a short video of. This is going to include sound if I hooked it up correctly. and, again, you are welcome to not look;
I find this uncomfortable. Okay, so I want to encourage you to take a deep breath if you have been having trouble breathing
as I have during that. Some things I think to notice is the sort of calm detachment of the physician’s voice. So the physician is not at all distressed by this. And the way the baby is crying. I hear the baby’s crying as the way I hear babies cry when they are under extreme duress, not you know, “I am hungry.” So beyond the pain of the procedure itself and the pain of the many days it takes to heal, there are a number of complications that a
circumcision procedure puts a child at risk for. You can sort of divide them into two categories. Surgical complications, which go from the more minor, you know everyone has a scar that has been circumcised. A lot of men don’t actually know that
the ring around their penis is a circumcision scar, or they learn it when they hear me talk. But that always happens. But a number of other complications can be problematic that don’t occur all the time, like penile adhesions, when the healing process goes awry and two parts of the penis that weren’t supposed
to be connected link together. Then these panels show in top left (A) (A) that’s called a fistula, so its like a doctor induced hypospadias, the black line going down is a probe that’s
entering the meatus, the opening of the urethra and exiting out the additional hole that the physician has caused. (B) Top Right is a nearly amputated head of the penis. (C) Bottom Left so much skin of the penis has been removed (C) that the child’s corpus cavernosa and head of the penis
are lodged down inside the scrotum, and in (D) Bottom Right the penis was accidentally amputated entirely. There are also a number of post-operative complications ranging from difficulty in breast feeding, which is important because developing the ability to breast feed is essential for infants. Bleeding, which is another sort of minimizing term, you see that on consent forms,
you know like”Oh, bleeding”, well it turns out an infant only has
about 12 ounces of blood so bleeding a couple of ounces
might cause that child to die or require a blood transfusion. Increase in pain response. Infection, which is also very serious for a newborn. Meatitus, which is an irritation of the opening. That also can be problematic because if it gets bad enough the child will not be able to pee, and that
would require the child to have catheterization. Necrosis and even permanent loss of the penis, or death. I have talked with a pediatric urologist. He is the type of person who gets the complications
to deal with. He said that over a two-year period he had
more than 275 children to treat, almost half who required surgery, so they were subjected to an additional surgery in attempt to correct whatever damage happened. Okay, that’s most of the graphic stuff, except for in the next few slides we will see
pictures of the actual anatomy of adults, so you are also welcome to turn your heads aside for that. How many people have seen a penis that was intact? Either your own or a friends, you know? Okay, if you haven’t yet, see if you
can find someone who is willing to show you. I have talked to hundreds of men, both men who have been circumcised
and men who have not been circumcised. I hear a lot of men who have been circumcised feel upset about that. They are aware or have become aware
that something has been taken away from them, and that their bodies were subjected
to something without their choice. I also hear parents talk about
their regret from the procedure. So what is the foreskin? The foreskin is this sort of socially constructed thing. It’s really just part of the penis, but now that we have cut it off,
we have to give it a separate name. In fact, a lot of potential complications lists
that you get on your informed consent form say that one of the risks is that you might injure the penis. So we have constructed a reality in which
cutting of the penis is not injuring it; it is if you then cut part that you intended to leave
that it is an injury. So I want to show you what the foreskin is. I want to spend some time on that. The foreskin in the adult male,
the part that would have been removed, is about 12 to 15 square inches, it is about the size of a 3″ x 5″ index card. It is the most erogenous part of the human male. It contains 10 to 20 thousand fine touch nerve endings. And it also makes the penis shaft skin motile. So it is the difference, you know when
you are having sexual intercourse or some kind of interaction, it is the difference between this kind of interaction or something if you can image a part
of your body where the skin moves around nicely (My cheeks are floppy, so I can do that, you know). And that is actually a significant thing because there is another kind of nerve
that is called a stretch receptor that gets stimulated in that motion, and it is the male’s contribution
to mechanical lubrication during intercourse, either male-male or male-female. The foreskin can be broken down into a couple of specialized areas: the frenulum is this sort of… my hand isn’t really long enough but… It is this fanning out region here. and there is the ridged band below it,
that is were most of the nerves land. and the dartos muscle is a cutaneous muscle that allows the foreskin to respond to cold or fear by surrounding the penis and pulling it in towards the body. In 2007, the first research was done ever to attempt to assess where the penis is sensitive. So they took a group of males who were intact and a group of men who were circumcised. What you see on this color graph here is that the most sensitive regions are that maroon color and the second most sensitive regions are the purplish color. If we compare that to a circumcised penis what you see is that we have removed
most of the most sensitive areas and left just this region around the scar
and the remainder of the frenulum is really where most circumcised men are sensitive. Therefore, you can compare them this way, but you don’t have to believe me
if you can find a friend or two maybe one who is circumcised and one who is not, or maybe yourself, you can look and can see where
the sensitivity actually lies. For most men it is in this region of the frenulum or the scar remnant. So just to get you a real picture, what John here has done,
he’s a photographer, he has taken a person with a foreskin and drawn these lines, so you can see
how much tissue it is as it retracts. The other difference I want you to note is that the inside what it does it generally surrounds the penis, so it in a sense it invaginates it, it gives it an enclosure, and it keeps it moist. So, if you compare that with the circumcised penis, the tissue looks softer, moister and warmer, in addition to there being a lot more of it, and it doesn’t have the scar. Those arrows there are pointing to the scar, so you can see where that is. I did want to invite, if you have any questions, it is okay to ask me as we go along because I am giving a lot of information. Okay, then, jumping along to the parent. Like I said I have talked with hundreds of parents also especially doing all this work I do with parents, I have talked with many who
when they receive their child back, that is the moment at which
they understand what they had signed up for. So there is a problem with informed consent both that the information is lacking and that parents are sometimes
asked about it at an inconvenient moment, such as when they are in labor, you know. And they are also asked about it in this values neutral way. Like, would you like a pillow?
Would you like a cup of tea? Would you like your child circumcised? It carries the same sort of tone, you know, and I am concerned about that. So I view us as having this sort of
manufacturing pseudo informed consent process Where parents need to trust physicians — The physicians are supposedly the ones bringing in the discipline of medicine. So they come in, but they are given
this information that is very cursory, it lacks real information about the complications,
those are trivialized, the foreskin functions are completely omitted, it’s not mentioned that it is actually a sexual organ, and the ethical questions of making decisions
about your children’s bodies are omitted, and there is also this undeclared conflict of interest there is really a lot of commercial use of the tissue. So the other thing parents don’t know
is that it is painful for a week or longer afterwards. So the baby is not only in pain during the process, but the wound has to heal, it is a wound on the penis, and babies are very sensitive to pain. How many people have gotten to play with a baby, you know you
had a friend with a baby or you have had a baby a few days old? They are very fragile beings. So what we have done is we’ve put this wound on this child, and now this new parent who is dealing with the healing process and the process of figuring out what it is like to have this new baby; this new parent also has this added complications
of having to watch for signs of infection, of having to keep changing the bandage, and having
the baby be more upset than he normally would have been. In comparison, for the child who is not circumcised, all you have to do is well, almost nothing. In fact, you don’t even wash the penis. Just like you wouldn’t was a baby’s vagina with soap, you just rinse it. You don’t retract it; it becomes retractable on its own. You have a baby with fewer health problems,
and a child who is more content. Now, I promised you that I would show
that we actually do use the foreskin tissue. We use it for three things that I have been able to find. We use it for research, there are a large number of products
you can buy from Invitrogen which is actually a company from which
I buy other things that don’t contain foreskin cells from for my bio-physics research. So there are some of the products they sell
using neo-natal foreskins, you can look it up yourselves. At a hospital you can get “magic skin treatment” which is cultured, grown foreskin tissue, and if you are very wealthy you can buy cosmetics that are also derived from foreskin tissue. Oh, the cosmetics? Wait, say louder? Audience member,
“why would people want to use them on their skin?” Oh, people think that
they will make them less wrinkly. The idea is that baby cells, you know they are young, they do their job well,
you know… And, if you are disturbed by that, I am glad because I would like us to be disturbed by that. So let’s hear from an obstetrician
how they frame these sorts of things. This is Lisa Masterson being interviewed
on the Craig Ferguson Late, Late Show. LISA,” Yeah, and again
you know what that is a personal choice and as an Obstetrician,
I talk to my patients a lot about this. And really there’s a lot of health benefits
and there are some risk benefits, but it is really a social procedure. So you really have to decide,
do you want your son to look like you? You know it is a cultural thing it is a social thing, And there are some health benefits,
more for the lady than the man but as far as decreasing STDs and passing on to ah
you know other women HPV, which can cause cervical cancer, so decreasing STDs and cancer all that good stuff.” CRAIG,”But couldn’t you achieve the same effect
by washing your pee pee on a regular basis?” LISA,”You absolutely could.” CRAIG,”So we’re talking,
You can have this chopped off, or you can wash it, your call?” LISA,”Exactly.” CRAIG,
“That’s a tough choice there Doctor … I dunno!” So obviously I appreciate Craig’s point of view there. He is from Scotland,
where they coincidentally don’t do this to children. And think about her discourse, she’s saying you have to choose as a parent, and I want to question that framing of it. Do you have to choose other
body modification options for your child? Like a nose job, or things like that? And, if the idea of doing things to our children
because we want them to look a certain way chills you, I am glad because I want it to chill us. I want us to wonder why are we so busy making our children look like
what we think boys and girls should look like? In this case, we have this idea that boys
should look a certain way in their genitals. Okay, so the last section is,
how do we get practitioners doing this? So I have a few quotes
from practitioners who stopped doing it, like Marilynn Milos, a nurse who, after seeing it,
refused to assist with them and was fired for telling parents
they don’t need to do it. Michelle Storms, who is a very well known Obstetrician
[sic, she is a Family Medicine Practitioner] who said she was ridiculed and patronized
after stopping them in 1988. And I am at Georgetown, so I went and talked
to the Head of Obstetrics at Georgetown University Hospital, Obstetricians do most of them, and she says, “Medically it doesn’t make sense” “I don’t even like doing the procedure, but I do it well.” “I have performed thousands of circumcisions.” She was clear that it is a social procedure, she was clear that it doesn’t make sense medically, And she told me in our conversation
that she would not stop doing them. So how do we make physicians into that? Well, first we start by pathologizing a healthy organ. Not only is the foreskin absent
from most U.S. medical and anatomy texts, There is, therefore, no education of the function. It is not viewed as a sexually important organ. Physicians are only taught
how to remove it as a procedure. and they are mistaught care, they are mistaught
this “retract and wash” philosophy, which is problematic because as you can see
down at the bottom, the foreskin when you are born
is usually attached to the head of the penis. What you saw earlier in the circumcision video was the physician running this tool around to break
the foreskin loose so that they could cut it off. It is bonded like that to protect babies from,
well all the sorts of things that babies do, they might have feces or urine in their diaper, they might get scratched up. The foreskin has a protective function
when you are young. Gradually that detaches and the foreskin becomes retractable, but if you forcibly retract it, that tears it up and creates a site for infection, also if you wash with soap
that creates a site for infection. And finally,
we make this misdiagnosis called “phimosis”. There is a true problem called phimosis
when there is scar tissue at the opening of the foreskin, so it can’t retract and there are treatments for it use steroidal cream
to help the scar tissue soften. But when we think that a baby who is three weeks old because you can’t pull the foreskin back without
making the baby scream, that’s wrong. It is actually meant to be attached that way,
it grew that way and it will become retractable on its own. So, why do we do the circumcisions? Well if you look at why parents say they choose
the number one reason is appearance. They want their child to look like the other children
they’ll see or they want them to look like their Dad. They think it looks better,
or they think it is easier to keep clean. And I believe it is the solicitation by physicians
that reinforces or validates the choice to do this. The fact that physicians do it
makes it look like a reasonable thing. Physicians may also give several reasons
to collude with this idea, they may say it reduces penile cancer rates. That it reduces urinary tract infections (UTIs), Cervical Cancer rates in female partners
that your child might have when they grow up. And female to male HIV transmission rate reduction is sort of the newest reason. So as I showed you in the beginning,
we have this sort of cultural baggage a lot of reasons why we used to do circumcisions
that don’t make sense in today’s cultural setting, so we have had to come up with a posteriori reasons
in order to feel more comfortable with what we are doing. But I’ll analyze those in more depth. Besides the social critique that I think they are reasons
we made up after the fact, in order to feel comfortable with it. If we think about them carefully, appearance
and cleanliness, the number one reason that circumcision is done. Well that argument is used to support both
male and female genital cutting in every culture that I am aware of
that either of those practices occurs in. And they are just made up arguments, I mean, how can you say that something is cleaner
if you do one thing to it or another? Penile Cancer, the American Cancer Society says no,
it won’t protect you from penile cancer. It is also irrelevant; the rate is 1 in 100,000. More people may die from circumcision than penile cancer. Urinary tract infections, well that was based on a big study in 1986, done by a fellow, I kid you not, his name was Wiswell. And the problem was his instructions
caused urinary tract infections, selectively in subjects with foreskins because he told the parents to forcibly
retract the foreskin and wash with soap. So that is just like if you had a girl
and you forcibly douched her, you know a little girl, you would get
a higher rate of yeast and urinary tract infections because you have messed up
the colonies of protective bacteria. Cervical cancer in female partners, Well, first of all, a surgical preventive measure on an infant for a potential female partner when they grow up. I mean, how do we know this person
is not going to be a monk or gay? And they could do it themselves later. Also, cervical cancer is cause by human papilloma virus (HPV). Probably most of you guys know that because you
learned that in Sex Ed, right? Well the same authors went back and looked
at the husbands and wives in that study and they had different strains of HPV. So I don’t know if there was
under-the-table non-monogamy or what. But that throws the results
of that study totally into question because the husbands were not carrying the HPV
strains that gave the women the cervical cancer. Gesundheit. Okay, so the last one is circumcision
as an HIV preventative. Okay, that idea started in the 2000’s mostly. The evidence for it is three randomized control trials. They were performed in Africa, probably because you couldn’t get a
human review board to permit such a study in the U.S. They got volunteer men
who were willing to be circumcised; they randomly circumcised half of them. And they watched to see how quickly they got HIV. They had some problematic methodology
that I will get into later. And their claim was that that reduced
the rate at which men got HIV by 60%. Now the evidence against circumcision
as an HIV preventative are pretty much all the
other studies that have been done. The geographic data, if you look at correlation between
circumcision percentage and HIV rates in populations, it contradicts this conclusion. For example, the United States has the highest HIV rate
of any industrialized nation, and also has the highest circumcision rate
of any industrialized nation. You would expect something different
if circumcision were so protective. So, I’ve got a few minutes left. I am going to quickly
run through what I think was wrong with the study. Again, there were three studies, they took a group of intact men,
circumcised them and watched how quickly they got HIV. The problems were, each time they came
to the clinic they gave them condoms and safe sex counseling. But the circumcised group came
at least twice more because they had to come to get circumcised
and they had to come to get a follow up study. In addition, if you are circumcised, it will take you about four to six weeks
until you are able to have sex again. And the circumcised group was asked
to abstain for six weeks. But they didn’t start the clock
until after waiting for six weeks, they started the clock at the beginning, so the circumcised group had six weeks of protection by being unable to have intercourse. In addition, they used an anti-body test, which you know, if you go to an STD clinic and they use an antibody test,
there is a three-month window. They tell you, you’ve got to wait
until three months after your last exposure if you really want to know if you have HIV. But again, they didn’t start the clock after three months and most the benefit or half the benefit
occurred during those first three months. So those infections occurred prior
to the start of the trial, prior to the randomization and intervention. There were a lot of problems concerning controls, including blood exposure
and receptive anal intercourse. I am also concerned because the authors of that study likened circumcision to an effective vaccine. Now all they are saying is that,
if their results are accurate, which I don’t believe, that it would reduce
your likelihood of getting HIV, you know each time you had sex, by 60%. So, if you have sex enough, you will
et HIV anyway with enough risky behavior. The measles vaccine, if you took that and its boosters,
99% of you become immune to measles. Probably you are actually. So that is what an effective vaccine looks like. Ninety-nine per cent permanent immunity. Not sixty per cent less likelihood
to become infected each time you are exposed. And real human beings think they are immune
to HIV because they have been circumcised in African countries, and I am very concerned about that. But anyway, so to re-cap, I think we have a social bias
toward cutting children, particularly boys. I think that it is very harmful to children. It also hurts survivors. It hurts parents, who really want
the best for their children. And it also hurts practitioners because I believe that medical students
come into school wanting to help people, and they get taught about this procedure
in an out-of-context kind of way. Most of the people I talk to think it is
not their responsibility to do anything about it, including professional organizations
like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the practitioners, you know, because their job is to keep the practitioners looking good. So, if you say something is bad that your practitioners
are doing, that doesn’t look so good. The administrators of the hospital
and the practitioners there don’t want to stand out. The obstetricians don’t even think
the child they are operating on is their patient. The ethics committee of the hospital told me that they are not
the appropriate venue for this concern. And I think all of these organizations
are neglecting parents, children, and us. So I am hopeful
that I have engaged you with some interest and that maybe you will go and tell people about this. Because, if they are not going to take responsibility,
I hope that we will. So tell your friends. I am going to give a link to this slide show to your professor.
[A link to the files is available in the description.]

Here at SciShow, we talk a lot about the fascinating,
complicated, and often very weird stories of discovery and collaboration that led to
the science we know today. But one of the strangest is something we haven’t
covered in much detail before, and it’s a biggie: the decades it took to figure out
exactly what HIV and AIDS were, and how to prevent and treat them. Since the start of the AIDS crisis, some 70
million people have been infected with HIV, and 35 million of those people have died. Both those numbers are staggering in their
own way, and together, they tell the story of a disease that has led to an incredible
amount of loss, but also one that — if you’re lucky enough to have access to the right medicines
— is no longer a death sentence. So, in honor of World AIDS Day on December
1, we want to tell you that story. There’s a lot to cover, so we’ll do it
in two parts. This episode, we’ll go over how we figured
out what HIV is, when the infection morphs into AIDS, and where we think the virus came
from. Next time, we’ll look back to the earliest
treatments, the arrival of antiretroviral drugs, which were complete game-changers,
and go over the creative ways scientists are now thinking about prevention and possibly
even a cure. But first, the basics. HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, is a
retrovirus that infects immune cells, most notably what are known as CD4 T cells. The “retrovirus” part just means that
the virus uses RNA — DNA’s more wily, less stable cousin — as its genetic material,
and that once HIV infects a cell, it makes a DNA version of its genome with a special
enzyme, then inserts that DNA into the host genome. If that sounds sneaky — well, it is. And it’s part of why HIV has been so difficult
to treat, which we’ll talk about more next time. Now, those CD4 T cells that HIV infects and
ultimately kills are a kind of white blood cell known as ‘helper’ T cells. When they recognize a threat, they pump out
proteins that help coordinate a bunch of different immune responses. You definitely want them around. HIV is spread by bodily fluids, including
blood, semen, vaginal fluid, and breast milk. That’s why HIV can be transmitted through
sex, dirty needles, breastfeeding, and any other swapping of fluids you might do — with
a major exception: saliva isn’t one of those fluids. Saliva is full of other stuff that prevents
HIV from being infectious, like antibodies and a bunch of antimicrobial proteins. So unless there’s a lot of blood in your
saliva for some reason, it can’t transmit HIV. When someone is first infected, they might
feel like they have a bout of the flu, with a fever, headache, rash, sore throat, and
muscle and joint pain. That’s because the virus is infecting lots
of cells and the immune system is trying to fight it off. But within a few weeks those symptoms pass
because by then the person has specific antibodies that can keep the virus from running totally
rampant. After that, they usually feel fine for a long
time — in many cases, a really long time, like several decades. Until, one day, they don’t, because the
virus has finally killed off too many T cells, leaving the body unable to properly defend
itself against pathogens — anything that might be dangerous or infectious. That’s when someone is said to have AIDS,
or acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Usually AIDS is diagnosed once the person’s
T cell count falls below 200 cells per microliter of blood, which is well below the normal 500-1500,
or if they develop what’s called an opportunistic infection. These are infections that anyone with a reasonably
strong immune system would be able to fight off, easy-peasy. But because HIV has obliterated most of their
T cells, AIDS patients get sick. And, they can die. Most of the time it’s an opportunistic infection
that killed them. So, some of that was probably familiar to
you, but pretend for a moment that you’ve never heard of HIV or anything else I just
mentioned. Because back in the ‘80s, we didn’t know
these basic facts. All doctors knew was that suddenly, healthy
young gay men were developing extremely rare infections and cancers — and, it was killing
them. One of the first people to notice the pattern
was an immunologist at UCLA. Between the fall of 1980 and the following
spring, he saw a string of five patients, all gay men in their 20s or 30s, with an unusual
kind of pneumonia. There was a fungus growing inside their lungs. Normally, the fungus was totally harmless
and would never infect the lungs, but in these men it had, and it was making it hard for
them to breathe. The patients also had oral thrush — basically
yeast infections in their mouths — and few CD4 T cells. By June, when the immunologist wrote up the
results for the CDC’s weekly Mortality and Morbidity report, two patients had died. A month later, a dermatologist in New York
chimed in with a similarly disturbing report, this time with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare
cancer where patients develop blotchy purple lesions on their skin. In two and a half years, 26 young gay men
in New York and LA had been diagnosed with Kaposi’s. Some also had the weird fungal pneumonia,
and 8 had died. It’s hard to imagine now, but at this point,
scientists had no idea what was making people sick. They didn’t know if it was some sort of
toxin or a pathogen. And if it was an infection of some kind, they
didn’t know how it was spreading. That meant they couldn’t warn people about
how to protect themselves. The association with gay men, though, was
certainly striking, and early on, many called the mystery disease GRID, for gay-related
immune deficiency. Lots of people would talk about it as the
“gay cancer” or “gay plague.” But the disease wasn’t limited to gay men. It was turning up in hemophiliacs — people
whose blood doesn’t clot properly and are treated with clotting factors taken from other
people’s blood. Doctors were also seeing cases in IV drug
users, women, infants, and heterosexual men. In particular, 20 recent immigrants from Haiti
had gotten sick, and none said they were gay. Those clues were important, because they told
scientists the disease — which had finally been given the name AIDS — was probably
infectious, and probably transmitted by blood. There were other diseases that spread in similar
ways, like hepatitis B. So in March of 1983, the CDC issued a warning
that doctors needed to be careful about blood transfusions, and that the disease seemed
to spread through both gay and straight sex. Debates about the specifics, including whether
it could spread through saliva, would happen later. But what was the infectious agent? The race was on for scientists to figure out
what was causing the disease. French molecular biologist Luc Montagnier
suspected a virus because at the time, the blood products hemophiliacs used were filtered
for things like bacteria and fungi. But viruses were too small to catch. So along with his colleague Françoise Barré-Sinoussi,
he searched cells taken from AIDS patients and found a retrovirus. Around the same time, Robert Gallo at the
NIH in the US also identified a retrovirus in samples from AIDS patients. Both groups published their work in May 1983,
and shortly afterward another team found yet another retrovirus. All the viruses had been given different names,
and at first, it’s wasn’t totally obvious that they were the same thing. But they were, and in 1986, the cause of AIDS
had been given an official name: HIV. So, HIV was the problem, but where had it
come from, and why had the epidemic struck now, in the decade of big hair and Michael
Jackson? While some researchers were scrambling to
identify whatever it was that made AIDS infectious, others noticed that macaque monkeys also seemed
to suffer from an AIDS-like disease. One group decided to take some blood samples
from these sick monkeys, and in 1985 they found a virus that was similar to HIV. It was eventually called SIV, for simian immunodeficiency
virus. Researchers started to think that HIV might
have come from our primate relatives, jumping the species barrier. After a lot of work, they figured out that
the virus behind the epidemic was very similar to the chimpanzee version of SIV, and they
were the ones who had passed it to us. But how exactly? There’s no real way to put this delicately,
but most scientists agree that the reason why SIV made the leap into humans — what’s
called a spillover — is because we had a taste for bushmeat, or wild game. In this case, monkeys and chimps. This is known as the cut-hunter hypothesis. In the course of butchering a chimpanzee,
some SIV-infected chimp blood enters a small cut on the hunter’s hand. Or, a bit of blood splatters in their mouth. The virus is close enough to human biology
to infect the hunter, and over time, if the hunter passes the virus along to enough people,
it evolves into the HIV we know today. Spillovers like these happened many times
— we can tell because the virus mutates quickly, and by looking at genetic differences,
we can identify multiple lineages of the virus, each one corresponding to a spillover. We’ve traced the current epidemic to just
one of these, called ‘M’ for main. By analyzing chimpanzee pee and poop, researchers
think the chimps who passed that version of the virus to us lived in southwestern Cameroon,
in the forests near the Congo. And based on the oldest blood samples we can
find that we now know have HIV in them, which are from 1959 and 1960, scientists estimate
that HIV-1 first infected humans around 1908. If that seems like a long time ago, well,
it takes a while for a virus to take off. By the 1920s, it’s thought that the virus
traveled downriver — in a person, of course — to the burgeoning city of Kinshasa, then
known as the Belgian colonial city of Leopoldville. There weren’t many women around other than
prostitutes, so experts think HIV spread that way, and possibly through injectable drugs
the colonists used to treat some tropical and venereal diseases. This was before disposable syringes, and nurses
were trying to treat lots of people with just a few of them, so the syringes may have only
been rinsed with alcohol before being used on the next patient. So the very methods meant to stop the spread
of disease may have actually been
encouraging it. With time, infected people in Kinshasa left
to go to other places, and they did the unavoidable: they brought the virus with them. Because the virus mutates so quickly, we can
group the viruses into 9 different subtypes and get a sense of how HIV traveled around
the world from Central Africa. Several subtypes spread to other parts of
Africa. Subtype C went south and then landed in India. Subtype B went to Haiti — and then, through
several quirks of history, came to the US. First, in 1960, when the Belgians left the
Congo, French-speaking Haitians started to arrive in the Congo to work as doctors, lawyers,
and other professionals. But with the creation of Zaire in 1965, the
immigrants felt unwelcome, so they went back to Haiti, bringing HIV with them. There, HIV expanded especially quickly, possibly
because of a plasmapheresis center where people could get paid to donate their blood plasma. The center used a machine that mixed the blood
of different donors, allowing viruses to transfer. By 1982, nearly 8 percent of a group of young
mothers in a Port-au-Prince slum were HIV-positive — an astoundingly high number. HIV is thought to have entered the US around
1969, with just one infected person or unit of plasma from Haiti. It took about a decade for anyone to notice,
but by then it was too late. The epidemic had begun, and HIV was not only
in the Americas, but Europe and Asia, too. And now that it was here, we needed to figure
out how to fight it. But we’ll get to that in the next episode
of this mini-series. In the meantime, thanks for watching this
episode of SciShow, and if you want to learn more about HIV and all kinds of other science,
you can go to youtube.com/scishow and subscribe.

Hello… Welcome Back to Early Signs Zone. Today our video about: Early Symptoms of HIV
in Men. Before we begin You can consider to subscribe
so You won’t miss the next great videos from us. Symptoms of HIV can vary between individuals
however the first signs of infection generally appear within the first 1-2 months. Many, but not all, people will experience
severe flu-like symptoms which is your body’s natural response to the virus. This is called the ‘seroconversion’ period. It’s during this time that it’s crucial
to identify if HIV is the cause, as your viral load is very high which greatly increases
the risk of passing it on. And the only way to know for sure is by getting
tested. When it comes to HIV infection, it’s important
to know what early symptoms to look for. Early detection of the infection can help
ensure that you receive prompt treatment to control the virus and to possibly slow the
progression into AIDS. Symptoms associated with the flu may be the
first to arise as early signs of HIV. Early signs of HIV include: Symptom 1: Fever The fever, usually one of the first symptoms
of HIV, is often accompanied by other mild symptoms, such as fatigue, swollen lymph glands,
and a sore throat. At this point the virus is moving into the
blood stream and starting to replicate in large numbers. As that happens, your immune system induces
an inflammatory reaction. Symptom 2: Fatigue and Headache The inflammatory response generated by your
besieged immune system can cause you to feel tired and lethargic. Sometimes it can make you feel winded while
walking or generally feel out of breath. Fatigue can be both an early and later symptom
of HIV. Symptom 3: Swollen lymph nodes, achy muscles
and joint pain Lymph nodes are part of your body’s immune
system and protect your blood by getting rid of bacteria and viruses. They tend to get inflamed when there’s an
infection. Many of them are located in your armpit, groin
and neck which can result in aches and pains in these areas. Symptom 4: Skin rash Skin rashes can occur early or late in the
course of HIV seroconversion. In some cases the rash can appear similar
to boils with itchy, pink breakouts. Symptom 5: Nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea Many people experience digestive system problems
as a symptom of the early stages of HIV. However, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea can
also appear in later stages of infection, usually as the result of an opportunistic
infection. It is important to stay hydrated. Diarrhoea that is unremitting and not responding
to usual therapy might be an indication of HIV. Symptom 6: Sore throat and dry cough A severe, dry cough that can last for weeks
to months without seeming to resolve (even with antibiotics and inhalers) is a typical
symptom in very ill HIV patients. Symptom 7: Night sweats Many people will get night sweats during the
early stages of HIV. These can be even more common later in infection
and aren’t related to exercise or the temperature of the room. With such a vast array of symptoms, HIV testing
is vital to ensure a proper diagnosis. If you think you’ve been exposed to HIV,
or have an active sex life with casual sex partners, regardless of whether you are showing
symptoms of HIV or not, it’s important to get tested as soon as possible. Do signs differ for men and women? HIV is different in women and men. According to the Office on Women’s Health,
some health issues, including sexually transmitted infections and vaginal yeast infections, are
more common and more serious in women who have HIV. After the early stage After the early stage of HIV, the virus moves
into a stage called the clinical latency stage. This can also be referred to as chronic HIV
infection. The virus is still active during this stage,
but it reproduces at much lower rates in the body. During the clinical latency stage of HIV,
a person may not have any symptoms. Some people who are not taking any medicine
to treat their infection may remain in this phase for 10 or more years. However, other people may progress past the
latency stage more quickly. A person who receives treatment for HIV can
improve their chances of remaining in the clinical latency stage for several decades. The treatment is known as antiretroviral therapy,
or ART. It helps keep the virus in check.

16 Signs You May Have HIV
Think you have HIV? The only way to tell is to get an HIV test, but here are some possible
symptoms. HIV symptoms
Within a month or two of HIV entering the body, 40% to 90% of people experience flulike
symptoms known as acute retroviral syndrome (ARS). But sometimes HIV symptoms don’t appear for
years—sometimes even a decade—after infection. “In the early stages of HIV infection, the
most common symptoms are none,” says Michael Horberg, MD, director of HIV/AIDS for Kaiser
Permanente, in Oakland, Calif. One in five people in the United States with HIV doesn’t
know they have it, which is why it’s so important to get tested, especially if you have unprotected
sex with more than one partner or use intravenous drugs.
Here are some signs that you may be HIV-positive. Fever
One of the first signs of ARS can be a mild fever, up to about 102 degrees F. The fever, if it occurs at all, is often accompanied
by other usually mild symptoms, such as fatigue, swollen lymph glands, and a sore throat.
“At this point the virus is moving into the blood stream and starting to replicate in
large numbers,” says Carlos Malvestutto, MD, instructor of infectious diseases and immunology
in the department of medicine at NYU School of Medicine in New York City. “As that happens,
there is an inflammatory reaction by the immune system.”
Fatigue The inflammatory response generated by your
besieged immune system also can cause you to feel tired and lethargic. Fatigue can be
both an early and later sign of HIV. Ron, 54, a public relations executive in the
Midwest, started to worry about his health when he suddenly got winded just walking.
“Everything I did, I got out of breath,” he says. “Before that I had been walking three
miles a day.” Ron had tested HIV positive 25 years before
feeling so tired; fatigue during acute, or newly contracted, HIV might not be so obvious.
Achy muscles, joint pain, swollen lymph nodes ARS is often mistaken for the flu, mononucleosis,
or another viral infection, even syphilis or hepatitis.
That’s not surprising: Many of the symptoms are the same, including pain in the joints
and muscles and swollen lymph glands. Lymph nodes are part of your body’s immune
system and tend to get inflamed when there’s an infection. Many of them are located in
your armpit, groin, and neck. Sore throat and headache
As with other symptoms, sore throat and headache can often be recognized as ARS only in context,
Dr. Horberg says. If you’ve engaged recently in high-risk behavior,
an HIV test is a good idea. Get tested for your own sake and for others: HIV is most
infectious in the earliest stage. Keep in mind that the body hasn’t produced
antibodies to HIV yet so an antibody test may not pick it up. (It can take a few weeks
to a few monthsfor HIV antibodies to show in a blood test). Investigate other test options
such as one that detects viral RNA, typically within nine days of infection.
Skin rash Skin rashes can occur early or late in the
course of HIV/AIDS. For Ron, this was another sign that he might
not have run-of-the-mill allergies or a cold. “They were like boils, with some itchy pink
areas on my arms,” Ron says. The rashes can also appear on the trunk of the body. “If
[the rashes] aren’t easily explained or easily treated, you should think about having an
HIV test,” Dr. Horberg says. Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea
Anywhere from 30% to 60% of people have short-term nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea in the early
stages of HIV, Dr. Malvestutto says. These symptoms can also appear as a result
of antiretroviral therapy and later in the infection, usually as the result of an opportunistic
infection. “Diarrhea that is unremitting and not responding
at all to usual therapy might be an indication,” Dr. Horberg says. Or symptoms may be caused
by an organism not usually seen in people with healthy immune systems, he adds.
Weight loss Once called “AIDS wasting,” weight loss is
a sign of more advanced illness and could be due in part to severe diarrhea.
“If you’re already losing weight, that means the immune system is usually fairly depleted,”
Dr. Malvestutto says. “This is the patient who has lost a lot of weight even if they
continue to eat as much as possible. This is late presentation. We still see a lot of
these.” It has become less common, however, thanks to antiretroviral therapy.
A person is considered to have wasting syndrome if they lose 10% or more of their body weight
and have had diarrhea or weakness and fever for more than 30 days, according to the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services. Dry cough
A dry cough was the first sign Ron had that something was wrong. He at first dismissed
it as bad allergies. But it went on for a year and a half—and
kept getting worse. Benadryl, antibiotics, and inhalers didn’t fix the problem. Neither
did allergists. This symptom—an “insidious cough that could
be going on for weeks that doesn’t seem to resolve,” Dr. Malvestutto says—is typical
in very ill HIV patients. Pneumonia
The cough and the weight loss may also presage a serious infection caused by a germ that
wouldn’t bother you if your immune system was working properly.
“There are many different opportunistic infections and each one can present differently,” Dr.
Malvestutto says. In Ron’s case, it was Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP), aka “AIDS pneumonia,” which
eventually landed him in the hospital. Other opportunistic infections include toxoplasmosis,
a parasitic infection that affects the brain; a type of herpes virus called cytomegalovirus;
and yeast infections such as thrush. Night sweats
About half of people get night sweats during the early stages of HIV infection, Dr. Malvestutto
says. These can be even more common later in infection
and aren’t related to exercise or the temperature of the room.
Similar to the hot flashes that menopausal women suffer, they’re also hard to dismiss,
given that they soak your bedclothes and sheets. Nail changes
Another sign of late HIV infection are nail changes, such as clubbing (thickening and
curving of the nails), splitting of the nails, or discoloration (black or brown lines going
either vertically or horizontally). Often this is due to a fungal infection, such
as candida. “Patients with depleted immune systems will be more susceptible to fungal
infections,” Dr. Malvestutto says. Yeast infections
Another fungal infection that’s common in later stages is thrush, a mouth infection
caused by Candida, a type of yeast. “It’s a very common fungus and the one that
causes yeast infections in women,” Dr. Malvestutto says. “They tend to appear in the mouth or
esophagus, making it difficult to swallow.” Ron woke up one day to find white patches
on his tongue. He had thrush. For him, “It was not bothersome other than I didn’t like
having it.” The infection was hard to get rid of, but finally cleared up after Ron started
taking drugs to combat HIV. Confusion or difficulty concentrating
Cognitive problems could be a sign of HIV-related dementia, which usually occurs late in the
course of the disease. In addition to confusion and difficulty concentrating,
AIDS-related dementia might also involve memory problems and behavioral issues such as anger
or irritability. It may even include motor changes: becoming
clumsy, lack of coordination, and problems with tasks requiring fine motor skills such
as writing by hand. Cold sores or genital herpes
Cold sores (oral herpes) and genital herpes can be a sign of both ARS and late-stage HIV
infection. And having herpes can also be a risk factor
for contracting HIV. This is because genital herpes can cause ulcers that make it easier
for HIV to enter the body during sex. And people who have HIV tend to have more severe
herpes outbreaks more often because HIV weakens the immune system.
Tingling and weakness Late HIV can also cause numbness and tingling
in the hands and feet. This is called peripheral neuropathy, which also occurs in people with
uncontrolled diabetes. “This is when the nerves are actually damaged,”
Dr. Malvestutto says. These symptoms can be treated with over-the-counter pain relievers
and antiseizure medicines such as Neurontin (gabapentin).
Menstrual irregularities Advanced HIV disease appears to increase the
risk of having menstrual irregularities, such as fewer and lighter periods.
These changes, however, probably have more to do with the weight loss and poor health
of women with late-stage infection rather than the infection itself.
Infection with HIV also has been associated with earlier age of menopause (47 to 48 years
for infected women compared to 49 to 51 years for uninfected women).
Individuals pictured are models and are used for illustrative purposes only.

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome AIDS
is a chronic potentially life-threatening condition caused by the
human immunodeficiency virus HIV by damaging your immune system HIV
interferes with your body’s ability to fight the organisms that cause disease
HIV is a sexually transmitted infection STI it can also be spread by contact
with infected blood or from mother to child during pregnancy childbirth or
breastfeeding without medication it may take years before HIV weakens your
immune system to the point that you have AIDS there’s no cure for hiv/aids but
there are medications that can dramatically slow the progression of the
disease these drugs have reduced States deaths in many developed nations
symptoms the symptoms of HIV and AIDS vary depending on the phase of infection
primary infection acute HIV most people infected by HIV develop a flu-like
illness within a month or two after the virus enters the body this illness known
as primary or acute HIV infection may last for a few weeks
possible signs and symptoms include fever headache muscle aches and joint
pain rash sore throat painful mouth sores swollen lymph glands
mainly on the neck these symptoms can be so mild that you might not even notice
them however the amount of virus in your bloodstream viral load is quite high at
this time as a result the infection spreads more easily during primary
infection on during the next stage clinical latent infection chronic HIV in
some people persistent swelling of lymph nodes occurs during this stage otherwise
there are no specific signs and symptoms HIV remains in the body and in infected
white blood cells this stage of HIV infection generally lasts around 10
years if you’re not receiving antiretroviral therapy but sometimes
even with this treatment it lasts for decades some people develop more severe
disease much sooner symptomatic HIV infection as the virus continues to
multiply and destroy your immune cells the cells in your body that help fight
off germs you may develop mild infections or chronic signs and symptoms
such as fever fatigue swollen lymph nodes often one of the first signs of
HIV infection diarrhea weight loss or all yeast in
affection thrush shingles herpes zoster progression to AIDS thanks to better
antiviral treatments most people with HIV in the u.s. today don’t develop AIDS
untreated HIV typically turns into AIDS in about ten years when AIDS occurs your
immune system has been severely damaged you’ll be more likely to develop
opportunistic infections or opportunistic cancers diseases that
wouldn’t usually trouble a person with a healthy immune system the signs and
symptoms of some of these infections may include soaking night sweats recurring
fever chronic diarrhea persistent white spots or unusual lesions on your tongue
or in your mouth persistent unexplained fatigue weight
loss skin rashes or bumps causes HIV is caused by a virus it can spread through
sexual contact or blood or from mother to child during pregnancy childbirth or
breastfeeding how does HIV become AIDS HIV destroys cd4 t-cells white blood
cells that play a large role in helping your body fight disease
the fewer cd4 t-cells you have the weaker your immune system becomes you
can have an HIV infection for years before it turns into its AIDS is
diagnosed when the cd4 t-cell count falls below 200 or you have an
aids-defining complication treatments there’s no cure for HIV / aids but many
different drugs are available to control the virus such treatment is called
antiretroviral therapy or AR T each class of drug blocks the virus in
different ways AR T is now recommended for everyone
regardless of cd4 t-cell counts it’s recommended to combine three drugs from
two classes to avoid creating drug-resistant strains of HIV every
individual needs unique treatment and care we encourage people with acquired
immunodeficiency syndrome AIDS and their families to learn as much as possible
about the latest medical treatment and approaches as well as healthy lifestyle
choices stay strong live long thank you

Hello… Welcome Back to HIV Pedia.. Today our video is about: hiv symptoms in
women. If this is the first time, you visit here. Please consider to subscribe, so you won’t
miss the next great videos from us. HIV stands for human immunodeficiency virus. It harms your immune system by destroying
the white blood cells that fight infection. AIDS stands for acquired immunodeficiency
syndrome. It is the final stage of infection with HIV. Not everyone with HIV develops AIDS. HIV often spreads through unprotected sex
with an infected person. Women can get it more easily during vaginal
sex than men can. HIV may also spread by sharing drug needles
or through contact with the blood of an infected person. HIV Symptoms in Women
In general, the HIV infection follows a similar pattern in men and women:
• Acute illness: This may or may not occur. If it does, it will usually occur soon after
exposure to the infection. • Asymptomatic period: This is a significantly
longer phase. Like the name says, HIV carriers will not
experience any symptoms. This period of time can last ten years or
more. • Advanced infection: In this late phase
of infection, carriers will experience a highly weakened immune system. This is the stage that makes you susceptible
to a number of other illnesses that are tougher for HIV to combat. There are also some specific HIV symptoms
in women that would not affect men, including: • Increased frequency of vaginal yeast infections
• Abnormal menstrual cycles • Severe pelvic inflammatory disease (PID)
• An increased risk of cervical cancer • A pregnant woman may potentially pass
HIV on to her baby Phase 1: Acute Illness
It may take a couple of weeks for HIV Symptoms in Women to become visible during this initial
phase. For 80% of infected people, the first symptoms
appear within two-to-four weeks and often resemble the flu. These symptoms may include:
• body rash • fever
• sore throat • severe headaches
• fatigue • swollen lymph nodes
• ulcers in the mouth or on the genitals • muscle aches and joint pain
• vaginal infections, such as yeast infections and bacterial vaginosis
• nausea and vomiting • night sweats
Of course, that’s assuming the symptoms are even visible at all. Many people with HIV may not see symptomsfor
several years. The only way to truly know for sure whether
or not you have HIV is to get tested. Phase 2: Asymptomatic Period
Once the first phase ends, the initial symptoms will completely disappear. During this seemingly dormant stage, the virus
is actually replicating within your body. Though you don’t feel sick, the virus is
still actively weakening your immune system. This deceptive nature of HIV is a key reason
why regular STD testing is imperative. Phase 3: Advanced Infection
During the last stage of the infection, your immune system is severely damaged. Standard “run of the mill” illnesses can
now become life threatening. With a weakened immune system, you may notice
that you frequently get colds, flus, and fungal infections and have a harder time fighting
them off. If you’ve detected the infection by this
point, treatment will greatly improve your ability to live a normal lifestyle. During this stage, you might experience the
following AIDS symptoms: • nausea
• vomiting • diarrhea
• fatigue • rapid weight loss
• shortness of breath • fever
• chills • night sweats
• rashes, sores, or lesions • swelling of the lymph nodes in the armpits,
groin, or neck • memory loss, confusion, or neurological
disorders How Does HIV Affect Pregnancy? For women that are pregnant, HIV can cause
other complications. The virus can be transmitted from a mother
to her child during childbirth. This can also happen while breastfeeding. The risk of transmission from mother to child
can lessen through careful treatment during pregnancy, but only if the woman is aware
that the virus is present. The Best Prevention: Getting Tested
There isn’t a cure for HIV; however, getting treatment early can slow the progression of
the disease and significantly improve quality of life. A recent study found that people with HIV
might have a near-normal life expectancy, as long as they begin treatment before their
immune systems are too severely damaged. The best ways to prevent HIV infection are
relatively simple: Practice Safe Sex
Using a condom during any sex act isn’t foolproof, but it can seriously reduce the
possibility of contracting or spreading STDs and HIV. Get Tested for HIV Regularly
Getting tested is the only way to know whether or not you have HIV. The CDC recommends that all adults, from ages
18 to 65, should be routinely screened for the virus.

what’s going on everyone rave Taurasi here thank you so much for tuning in today I will be talking about what my symptoms were when I had HIV AIDS now as I’ve seven in the past I don’t know exactly when I contracted HIV all I know is that I was diagnosed on my birthday May 8th of 2012 which is six years ago this year so what I can tell you is that the I would say about a year to two years prior I slowly started developing more and more symptoms and the symptoms started becoming more severe I would say the first symptom that I really started experiencing and noticed was a general sense of lethargy I just noticed that my energy overall throughout the day was declining I didn’t really feel like myself it was harder and harder for me to get out of bed I had a hard time getting through work I was serving at a restaurant and I just found myself having to drink more coffee or Red Bull or lots of green teas throughout the day and it just kept I kept needing more and it was it wasn’t the same as having like a caffeine tolerance I’ve had that before and I just noticed that over time like nothing was really working and I just kind of felt a little more dull my energy my zest for life was kind of dimming and I felt a little bit more like a zombie in it and I wasn’t quite sure what that was I I was going to the to the gym and I started working out because I thought maybe if I’m exercising just trying to be more fit overall that battle helmet and her energy levels so I started doing basic exercises at the gym I had no idea how to do how to benchpress I had no idea how to squat I had no idea how to deadlift so to say that I was you know really intensely actively working out is probably like missing the mark a little bit because I was definitely beginner at that point I was only using machines maybe some light dumbbells for like curls or something like that and then I would do a little bit on the elliptical but nothing really that crazy so but I did notice however that even going to the gym and trying to pack on muscle and taking protein that I was actually losing losing I felt like I was losing muscle mass I didn’t feel like I was really gaining anything I’m just kind of weird to me I also was losing weight but I attributed that to go into the gym and working out and trying to eat someone healthy here and there wasn’t it wasn’t that great but I was making some attempt but looking back I would say that I can probably attribute some muscle loss and some body mass loss specifically to the fact that I had hiv/aids and didn’t know it and that’s why I wasn’t able to gain also the next symptom that I noticed was vertigo this isn’t something that I really have experienced that much in my life occasionally here and there if you know if I hadn’t been eating maybe I was low on blood sugar or tired or something like that but is usually random and few and far between but I was pretty regularly I would say maybe three four times a week I would whether I was sitting standing moving around it didn’t really matter I would suddenly get hit with a wave of vertigo everything would start spinning and I’d lose my balance dizzy and that would last for maybe ten to fifteen minutes had no idea why the next general symptom that I noticed was body aches all over my joints my muscles just every part of my body I attributed that of course since I was going to the gym to working out being sore from working out and exercising but in reality I would be sore in places that I hadn’t worked out but you know when you’re when you have no idea what to expect and HIV is the last thing on your mind you rationalize things and you kind of just give explanations of what is the most likely possibility and then if things don’t get worse it’s just it is what it is and you move on so after that I would say probably about a year out from my diagnosis I started to notice that I was getting itchy inflamed bumps on my elbows and on my knees if I put it under hot water it would exacerbate it and it would get more red and way more itchy now with this when I was a teenager I had gotten scabies at one point from sleeping in my friends bed and they got it and ended up going throughout the whole house but anyway during that time when I had scabies I didn’t I knew that that feeling was in the same places in my body and it was very itchy I would get red and stuff like that so I assumed that I was getting some sort of that uh since ever since then I just had sensitivity in those areas and that that was just like a some kind of skin rash that I was just gonna have to deal with as a result of having gone through that earlier in life and again rationalize it oh this is just you know something I’ve dealt with before and this is just I’m getting older and I got to deal with stupid skin things and people get psoriasis and stuff like that all the time so this is probably something that I got to deal with now keep in mind at the same time while I’m going through all this I don’t have health insurance I didn’t have access to health insurance so some of you are probably thinking well why don’t you just go to the doctor and have a doctor look at this stuff as it’s happening and then maybe the doctor would be able to put the pieces together and say maybe there’s something bigger going along here but at the time I didn’t have access I was making very little money a short time after having the symptom on my elbows and knees I started to get a different kind of rash but this time it was along the outsides of my hands along the outsides of my fingers just along the outside of my palm as well and along the same area but on my feet it was these red started out as like a red orangish bump and as it progressed it would it would fill with like a clear opaque liquid and so it would be bubbly and I’d have just tons and tons of bubbles all over really gross really unsightly for the most part didn’t bother me a little bit she a little bit tender sensitive but just for the most part unsightly and just just it was not I mean it’s not something that you want to see on your hands or your feet and I tried at some point popping them with a needle to see if flushing out the fluid would help didn’t help they would last for maybe a week week and a half to two weeks and then it would just subside but usually by then I’d get another flare-up and it would just be a cycle like that over these flare-ups on my hands and my feet now at this point this is when I started to get very suspicious and think something’s very wrong here some of you again despite not having a doctor and not having health insurance might think well why isn’t this guy considering the possibility that it’s HIV so a little backstory before I got together with my boyfriend at the time about three to four months before we gotten together I had gone to the doctor and gotten an STD check I was at UCLA they had a campus doctor that I could go see and so I just got tested I kinda had a scare I had unprotected sex and I just wanted to go and make sure that I was okay and that I didn’t have to worry about anything ease my mind and sure enough test results came back negative so and this is just before entering into a long-term what I thought was a monogamous relationship and believed I was negative didn’t have any STDs so I didn’t have any reason to believe that I would have HIV that’s why I didn’t really cross my mind that’s why I didn’t assume that maybe that was a possibility so at this point I began to notice weird bumps on my body lumps I should say I noticed that under here under my jawline in my chin there were two big round mounds there and they felt larger than I thought I remembered but again with the rationalizing just like thinking maybe I’m just thinking that they’re they’re bigger but they’re not really and maybe I just never noticed it before I was getting sick I would say once every month to two months so I assumed that if there were my lymph nodes then there they’re probably just been fighting off colds and that’s normal and it’ll you know it’ll go away eventually and then I started to notice that I had some soreness in my armpits and I would feel there and there was like tender spots and I thought well I believe that there are lymph nodes there as well that’s interesting maybe my body’s just having a hard time okay well it is what it is and then I noticed two that were that I could feel on the base of my neck on the back one on each side I could feel the lymph nodes and again I just thought maybe they’ve always been there and maybe I just never noticed it just never really paid attention to stuff like that and now I’m being like hyper aware so now I’m paranoid and then the really weird one that really stood out and I was like whoa okay this is crazy behind my ears there apparently some lymph nodes right there because you remember those like ninety Snacks it’s uh it’s called a bugle and it looks like a cone literally my lymph nodes back here were so swollen that it felt like bugles sticking out it came out like a cone and they were huge I don’t know I didn’t know what to think of it I thought it was bizarre and strange but I wasn’t necessarily feeling sick I didn’t feel horrible I didn’t have to go to the emergency room there was nothing pressing so I just kind of let it slide for a while I mean of course nowadays looking back in retrospect I’m like what were you thinking you should have gone to the doctor immediately but at the time I just didn’t really think much of it except it was weird it was a little concerning but what am I gonna do and then the very last symptom that finally drove me to go to a doctor was a sword that I kept getting in the back of my throat and my tonsils being I believe it was my tonsils being inflamed I thought that I had strep throat in the back my throat well that’s what it was because it was sore and it wasn’t really healing and I was getting like other symptoms like flu-like symptoms and feeling achy sick so it would I would get it and it would last for maybe two weeks and then it would go away I think okay great it resolved itself didn’t need any biotics thank God and then a few weeks later it would come back again hey big Dan look here it is again I gotta go through this all over again it would last another week or two and then this time it wouldn’t go away it was like three weeks and I’m saying I still have it it still hurts so sore and so my boyfriend at the time his dad had access to medicine and he’s like let me hit him up in another state and send over prescription for you to take antibiotics so I take antibiotics it works boom gone great awesome I can move on with my life nope a couple weeks later comes right back so I think this happened for maybe three four times and then I was like okay woah it’s been two three months of this it’s not going away I need to go to a doctor I need to find out how to go to a doctor and that’s when I started really scouring the internet and googling how do I get into a doctor’s office a hospital whatever I found some obscure random program here in LA that would give me really basic health insurance for free it was so obscure when I went in to go apply for it the lady looked at me she was like how did you even how did you even know about this program and I was like I’m not the Internet she’s like okay totally weird I guess it’s probably something that people only have access to through caseworkers normally but I had I found it in some tiny little site I don’t know if it was through a forum or what but thank God I did because I went in and the doctor immediately was like let’s do a swab of your back of your throat make sure it’s not you know some sort of STD I came back a week later that’s when I found out I had HIV came back a week after that on my birthday and that’s when I I had AIDS so those were my symptoms when I had hiv/aids if you enjoyed or got something out of this video please like below subscribe if you haven’t already and if you think someone else might benefit from this go ahead and share also go ahead and check out my previous vlog it’s about my most recent HIV doctor’s visit so you can see what my whole experience is like from showing up to the doctor’s office what we talk about what we go through getting blood drawn and all that stuff and kind of lift the veil and that whole experience check it out it’s my most recent vlog I’ll have it here for you thank you guys for watching and stay tuned I’ll see you soon Cheers

Greetings! Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand. Thanks for checking out this video. We’re going to talk about systemic Candida,
or invasive Candida. Many people that consult me believe they’ve
actually got systemic Candida. “I’ve got Candida throughout my body! It’s everywhere. It’s in my blood! It’s in my brain! It’s in my joints! It’s in my fingers! It’s in my penis! It’s in my vagina! It’s everywhere. I’m loaded with Candida! What am I going to do? Help me.” Well, you haven’t got systemic Candida, ok? Please don’t get the word systemic or invasive
Candida confused with a yeast infection. There’s a huge difference. Candida as we’ve mentioned many times before
can live quite normally in the gut, in the digestive system, or on the skin, and it does
with many people. It cohabits with many different types of bacteria. And, as we mentioned in previous videos, if
the scales are tipped, if there’s a big imbalance for one of many reasons, you can get a yeast
infection. However, an invasive or systemic yeast infection
is not that easy to get. Even though it accounts for about 40,000 to
50,000 people getting admitted to hospital each year in the U.S. alone, it’s a serious
blood borne infection and one of the leading blood borne infections in many western countries. It’s generally found in seriously immunocompromised
people. Chances are if you’re looking at this video
right now on your laptop, you haven’t got systemic Candida. Because you wouldn’t be looking at this computer. You would probably be in a hospital bed. This is a serious infection that often requires
lengthy hospital stays, very expensive long term treatment and often very poor patient
outcomes. The type of people that are more prone to
getting systemic yeast infection are HIV/AIDS people. Do you have AIDS/HIV? Probably not. You may have. And if you do have you are at a higher risk
of getting a systemic infection. A person with quite bad diabetes may get it. A person who has an organ transplant or a
patient with cancer on very powerful chemotherapy drugs or immunosuppressive drugs. A person who’s had major abdominal surgery. A person who’s had a central line put in their
chest or neck, one of these central catheters to take drugs. These are people that are at a high risk for
systemic Candida, or we call it Candidemia. So, it is a big problem, but chances are you
won’t be having this problem. I really don’t think you have got it. Chances are that you’ll have it in the gut
or on the skin. If you’ve got it in the gut and because the
gut interfaces with the body, you can feel pretty crappy all throughout the body, but
it doesn’t mean to say you’ve got a blood borne yeast infection. The major signs and symptoms of that are a
serious fever and being very sick to the point where you need hospitalization. Then it will be picked up in the bloodstream. This is why doctors laugh at a lot of people
who say, “You haven’t got Candida, that’s crazy. Only AIDS people get Candida.” Doctors are confused as well, because they
believe that it’s not possible for a person to suffer the consequences of a gut-borne
yeast infection systemically. So now you can see patients get confused. They think they’ve got a systemic yeast infection. Doctors get confused, because they only know
of a systemic yeast infection, and don’t believe that people can’t get it in their gut and
feel it systemically. Are you confused? Well I’m not, because I’ve been doing this
now for nearly 30 years, and I see lots of cases like this. Please try and understand: chances of you
having a systemic yeast infection are next to nil. Thanks for tuning in.

Today We will talk about Early Signs Of HIV
In Women. Before we Begin Please subscribe our channel
so you wont miss the next great videos from us. HIV infection and AIDS has been declared an
epidemic since 1981. According to the World Health Organization,
47% of HIV infected adults are women. Although it affects more men than women, the
risk of women getting HIV will increase if the current rate of HIV infection cases continues
to escalate. In this video, you will learn what the early
signs of HIV in women are and other facts you may want to know about HIV and AIDS. How HIV works Let us first talk about HIV before proceeding
to the common signs of HIV in its early stages. The lentivirus named Human Immunodeficiency
Virus (HIV) can be transmitted from one person to another through the bodily fluids of an
already infected person. Bodily fluids include blood, breast milk,
semen and vaginal fluids. This is why those who are sexually active
should not consider unprotected sex. Blood transfusion is another major agent of
HIV transmission along with the use of infected syringes or needles. Lastly, infected mothers can transfer HIV
to their baby during pregnancy, birth and breast feeding. What the HIV virus does to your health is
that it weakens the immune system. HIV attacks the white blood cells which protect
the human body from foreign organisms. The longer you are infected the less effective
your immune system will be. AIDS is the stage where HIV infection is no
longer controllable. At this stage, the body will suffer from various
health complications simply because the body can no longer protect itself. HIV can remain dormant in the host for up
to 7-10 years; although some people experience the early signs of HIV infection as early
as two weeks after infection. Early Signs of HIV in Women It is important for women to know about the
early signs and symptoms of HIV infection because early diagnosis can increase life
expectancy of the infected patient. Healthcare specialists have developed treatments
and therapies that are more effective if HIV infection is detected early enough. In the US, the Department of Health and Human
Services Minority AIDS Initiative are working hand in hand with the government in order
to help prevent women from getting HIV infection; initiatives such as demonstrating projects
on women’s social networks, conducting outreach and testing programs and providing funds for
prevention programs for the local health departments and community based organizations. It has been shown that women tend to neglect
their health because of work, household chores or prioritizing children and is the main reason
why women are diagnosed with the infection at a later stage. Knowing the early signs of HIV for women is
a way of preventing the infection from getting worse. Listed below are the signs and symptoms of
HIV, for both men and women, which may occur as early as two weeks after infection: Cough
Diarrhoea Dizziness and fatigue
Fever Night sweats
Muscle and joint pain Persistent skin conditions Meanwhile, here are the common early signs
of HIV in Women: Anorexia
Delirium Depression
Loss of concentration or forgetfulness Body fat changes
Anxiety Yeast infection
Weight loss Difficulty in breathing Note that not all women who have HIV infection
experience all, some, or one of the signs and symptoms of HIV as stated above. It is on a case by case basis and every woman
is different from another. It is also worth noting that women who are
HIV infected may find themselves suffering from abnormal menstrual cycles along with
the previously enumerated early signs of HIV in Women. Abnormal menstrual cycles may begin with one
or more missed periods with a worsening over time until the woman is unable to have her
period at all. According to research, cancer and heart disease,
developed because of AIDS, are the two main reasons why women die of a serious HIV infection. It is not known exactly when the early signs
of HIV in women will appear. As mentioned earlier, some people experience
these symptoms earlier as compared to others. Not all infected individuals suffer from the
early signs of HIV either. It is best to consult a doctor immediately
after experiencing one of the early signs of HIV in women or for both genders. The doctor will let you undergo a test that
will confirm whether or not you are indeed infected with HIV.